"Foundering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to risk foundering a valuable animal for the sake of getting to a place before one is wanted there," said he, laughing as if he had made some humorous remark. But laughter was not Casimir's strong point, and he made a ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... running on before it. The night was very dark, Harry was on deck. He hoped on the return of daylight to get an after jury-mast rigged, and to heave the ship too. All hands were at the pumps. By keeping them going alone, they well knew, could the ship be prevented from foundering. Suddenly there came a cry from forward of "Breakers ahead." It was followed by a terrific crashing, rending sound. The next sea lifted the ship to strike with greater force. Several of the passengers who rushed from the cabin, ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... effects, none of which quite satisfied him. He also had some trouble with one of the made-to-order life-boats. Finally, rather disgusted with the way things were going, he decided to cut out the lowering-of-the-boats scene and to have a fire at sea instead of a mere foundering. In a very few minutes, with the aid of "smoke-pots" and "blow-torches" a thrilling burning-ship scene was made, with the people scrambling toward the life-boats. Later, several long-distance views of the burning of a real ocean ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... mail brought more letters of like nature, until the office boy tallied nearly eight hundred. Then Haynerd, as if rousing from a dream, reached for the telephone and summoned Hitt to his rescue. The Social Era was foundering. Its mailing list had contained some fifteen hundred names. The subscription price was twelve dollars a year—and never, to his knowledge, had it been paid in advance by his ultra-rich patrons, most of whom were greatly in arrears. Haynerd saw it all vanishing ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... water was only about a foot in depth, but the black vegetable mud half afloat was unfathomable. I managed to wallow ashore, but poor Jack sank deeper and deeper until only his head was visible in the black abyss, and his Indian fortitude was desperately tried. His foundering so suddenly in the treacherous gulf recalled the story of the Abbot of Aberbrothok's bell, which went down with a gurgling sound while bubbles rose and burst around. I had to go to father for help. He tied a long hemp rope brought from Scotland around Jack's neck, and Tom and Jerry seemed to have ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... is now no more. Her indignant sisters stabbed her to death with hat pins and nail-files. Manicuring as a public profession is a comparatively recent development of our civilization. The fathers of the republic and the founders of the constitution, which was founded first and has been foundering ever since if you can believe what a lot of people in Congress say—they knew nothing of manicuring. Speaking by and large, they only got their thumbs wet when doing one of three things—taking a bath, going in swimming or turning a page in a book. Washington probably was never manicured nor Jefferson ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... now lowered, but it was too evident that they could only save a part of the people from the foundering ship. Those on her deck were now seen forming a raft. It was their last hope of life should the boats not take them off. Though several of the people made a rush to the side, they were driven back by the officers and soldiers who remained firm, and the men were told off ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... Like a mighty steam-ship foundering, Down the monstrous vision sank; And the ripple, slowly rolling, Plashed and played ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... fleet had sailed from Boston to attack Quebec. Frontenac, not easily alarmed, doubted the report. Nevertheless, he embarked at once with the intendant in a small vessel, which proved to be leaky, and was near foundering with all on board. He then took a canoe, and towards evening set out again for Quebec, ordering some two hundred men to follow him. On the next day, he met another canoe, bearing a fresh message from Prevost, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... millionaire, and the hungry laborer with his starving dependents? Do they not see that they must break down the one if they would build up the other? Do not these miserable bunglers see that this noble ship of the fathers is foundering because of ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... in darkness, storm, and danger. That wave-tossed boat in the midst of the sea is an emblem of the commonest human experience. On the wide sea of life, numberless little barks are at this moment at the point of foundering. Few are so richly freighted as yours, but the same unknown depths are beneath each. But, Miss Amy, I pray you remember the whole of this suggestive Bible story. Those imperilled disciples were watched by a ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... had been drowned by the foundering of his lumber barge in a storm. What little money he left was soon spent, and now Hamp had just been thrown out of employment by the closing of the mills in which he worked. Unless he speedily found a new place, his mother and sister would be ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... wearied with the exertion of keeping my feet and watching those giant seas, I went below and turned in. I slept, but the huge white-crested waves were still rolling before me, and big ships were foundering, and phantom vessels were sailing in the wind's eye, and I heard the bulkheads creaking, the wind whistling, and the waves roaring, as loudly as if I was awake; only I often assigned a wrong sign to the uproar. Hour after hour this continued, when, as I had at last gone off more ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... time Jack and the others had finished their little discussion, and were eager to further question the captain concerning all the details he could give about the foundering of the Ramona. But there was little else that could ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... tacking. The canoes were completely decked over, thus affording a cabin to their crews, and the means of preserving their cargo from damage. This also enabled the craft to go through very heavy seas without foundering. This canoe, however, was only half the size of the large double canoes of the Fejee and Tonga islanders, which are often a hundred feet long, and proportionably deep ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... by all men. If you offer us drink, and stop to gossip with us for a moment, you only do so to please yourselves with the spectacle of our infamy, our infirmity, our incongruity. We have lost all hope, all self-respect. We are ships that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go down. Yet we are not altogether to be pitied: we know life. To the respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world, decently attired: we know her at home in ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... was with great difficulty we could carry the reefed top-sails: The sudden changing of the wind, and its excessive violence, produced a sea so dreadfully hollow, that great quantities of water were thrown in upon our deck, so that we were in the utmost danger of foundering; yet we did not dare to shorten sail, it being necessary to carry all we could spread, in order to weather the rocky islands, which Sir John Narborough has called the Islands of Direction, for we could not now run back again into the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... strange.' Other men puffed, snorted, and splashed. George passed through the ocean with the silent dignity of a torpedo. Other men swallowed water, here a mouthful, there a pint, anon, maybe, a quart or so, and returned to the shore like foundering derelicts. George's mouth had all the exclusiveness of a fashionable club. His breast-stroke was a thing to see and wonder at. When he did the crawl, strong men gasped. When he swam on his back, you felt that that was the only possible method ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... sun-set when I reached the entrance to the park. I entered the avenue, and now my impatience became extreme, for although Peter continued to move at the same uniform pace, I could not persuade myself that he was not foundering at every step, and was quite sure we were scarcely advancing; at last I reached the wooden bridge, and ascended the steep slope, the spot where I had first met her, on whom my every thought now rested. I turned the angle of the clump of beech trees ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... wreck. While men and women were rushing through the gale with news of this disaster, and men and horses were being dashed about by the roaring sea, there came tidings that at the other end of the Manacles another ship filled with soldiers was foundering. In those days there was no Lifeboat Institution with its record of gallant services all along the coast. But there were men of the sort that the grandest lifeboat crews are made of, and six Porthoustock fishermen, taking the best boat they could find, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... lesser spires disappear one by one, until the great shaft is left standing alone,—solitary as the broken statue of Ozymandias in the desert, as the mast of some mighty ship above the waves which have rolled over the foundering vessel. Most persons will, I think, own to a feeling of awe in looking up at it. Few can look down from a great height without creepings and crispations, if they do not get as far as vertigos and that aerial calenture which prompts them to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was allowed above the gangways. The cries of the poor horses, as they felt themselves being washed overboard, were frightful to hear, and many a trooper cried himself as he thought of his horse foundering in the raging sea without. Before many minutes all was as dark as night, though the watch pointed to but four o'clock, and all lights were burning below deck. It was impossible to keep a light above, for no lantern could burn ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... loved in life—on his love for them, dead or living, grateful for his love or not, rather than on theirs for him—letting their images pass away again, or rest with him, as they would. In the bare sense of having loved he seemed to find, even amid this foundering of the ship, that on which his soul might "assuredly rest and depend." One after another, he suffered those faces and voices to come and go, as in some mechanical exercise, as he might have repeated all the verses he knew by heart, or like the telling of beads one by ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... distance off; and soon the launch, lying over before a strong gust, re-entered the zone of storms. Fortunately, the hurricane had shifted a point towards the south, and the launch was able to run before the wind, straight for the Pole, running the risk of foundering, but sailing very fast; a rock, reef, or piece of ice might at any moment rise before them, and crush them to atoms. Still, no one of these men raised a single objection, nor suggested prudence. They were seized with the madness of danger. Thirst for the unknown took possession of ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... of her life, however, occurred in her thirty-first year. She never quite recovered from the shock of her well-loved brother Edward's tragic death, a mysterious disaster, for the foundering of the little yacht La Belle Sauvage is almost as inexplicable as that of the Ariel in the Spezzian waters beyond Lerici. Not only through the ensuing winter, but often in the dreams of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the better sort, guests crowded round the fire, forgot to be political, and told each other with a secret gladness that the blast grew fiercer every minute. Each humble tavern by the water-side, had its group of uncouth figures round the hearth, who talked of vessels foundering at sea, and all hands lost; related many a dismal tale of shipwreck and drowned men, and hoped that some they knew were safe, and shook their heads in doubt. In private dwellings, children clustered ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... enough to get a view over the fore-yard. From this elevation an uninterrupted view of the object was to be obtained; and after long and careful scrutiny the man made it out to be the dismasted hull of a ship that was either water-logged, or upon the point of foundering. ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... foam flake tossed and thrown, She could barely hold her own, While the other ships all helplessly were drifting to the lee. Through the smother and the rout The 'Calliope' steamed out — And they cheered her from the Trenton that was foundering in the sea. ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... should be substantially increased.... But Trudi only snorted and shook her head, and Lady Hannah found herself confronting not only a rat determined upon abandoning a sinking ship, but malignantly inclined to hasten the vessel's foundering. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the pond is changed; anon so clear, Now back it swells, as though with rage and fear; A mimic sea its small waves rise and fall, And the poor rose is broken by them all. Its hundred leaves tossed wildly round and round Beneath a thousand waves are whelmed and drowned; It was a foundering fleet you might have said; And the duenna with her face of shade,— "Madam," for she had marked her ruffled mind, "All things belong ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... demanded. Sail had been lowered by slashing away the ropes that held the yards. The advance guard of boarders, a hundred strong, was ordered to the poop, and his grapnel-men were posted, and prompt to obey his command at the very moment of impact. As a result, the foundering Arabella was literally kept afloat by the half-dozen grapnels that in an instant moored her firmly ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... farewell. I soon found that I had not much improved my condition. The larger the ship, the greater was the amount of dirt and disorder. No one knew their duty, at all events no one did it. How they managed to exist a day without being blown up or foundering, I do not know. They were constantly smoking with the doors of the magazine open and ammunition scattered about, and night and day with every prospect of a squall, the lower deck ports were ever left open. I got ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... of Geoffrey, the Chief Justice, who was drowned at the foundering of The White Ship, when Prince William, the King's son, was lost. After the death of Matthias there was a vacancy of three years, until Ernulf (1107-1114), Prior of Canterbury came. He became Bishop of Rochester, ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... the craft well enough, and I knows the roads, too; there'll be no end of foundering against the breakers to find where ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... done, when another attempt made to wear her was equally fruitless as the former. The ship had now seven feet water in the hold which was gaining fast on the pumps, therefore, for her preservation it was considered expedient to cut away the mainmast, as she appeared to be in immediate danger of foundering. ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... mind, Sees all her sons at play; Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away; Allows the proudly-riding and the foundering bark. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... cruisers might have slipped seaward in hot haste for the breaking of the Havana blockade. Failing that, all might have concentrated an assault upon certain selected vessels and found consolation for final defeat in the foundering hulls of their enemy. But audacity did not count, individual bravery went for naught; because, while heavier constructions barred the way, and superior guns smashed the pathways of escape, energized skill overcame untrained courage and ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... in great peril of foundering owing to the violent gale and the hollow seas. We could not keep off the land, because we did not venture to carry sail, and so were wholly at the mercy of wind and waves, while it ...
— The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606-1765 • J. E. Heeres |
